Parks & Speculation

Unlike certain tone-deaf Hollywood moms, Amy Poehler recognizes how hard it can be for working mothers—particularly the hard road ahead for her Parks and Recreation character, Leslie Knope. Thus far adept at balancing her life priorities (“Friends, waffles, work. Or waffles, friends, work. Doesn't matter, but work is third.”), Knope was thrown a curveball last week when she and her husband, played by Adam Scott, found out they were having triplets. This news comes just when Knope is considering a big life and career change. Series creator Michael Schur said in an interview last week, “We wanted to do it at a time that was maximally crazy and inconvenient.”

When asked how she expected Knope to balance her career and the demands of triplets, Poehler said, “Yeah, it will be interesting to see how it changes her and challenges her in the next season.” Poehler paused here, choosing her words very carefully. “And then also it’s just like many working women, you use your combination of help, friends, you know, and gusto to get through every day.” Poehler stumbled slightly after the word “help” before clarifying that she wasn’t referring to the fleet of nannies that many celebrities have access to. This awareness, which is so typically Poehler, stands in stark contrast to the recent tin-eared statements by actresses like Salma Hayek and Gwyneth Paltrow that have gotten working mothers up in arms.

Indeed, it will be interesting to see Knope juggle babies and her career. But will we even get there? Parks and Recreation has been renewed for a seventh season, but many wonder if it will be the NBC sitcom’s last. With both Poehler and her co-star Chris Pratt enjoying booming film careers, the handwriting seems to be on the wall. Will Leslie giving birth be next season’s big finale? Maybe. Or maybe we’ll get there a little sooner. Throughout the interview, both Poehler and Schur insisted that they didn’t want to re-tread the pregnancy storyline they explored with Rashida Jones’s character, Ann Perkins, this last year. Schur said,

We don’t want to do the same thing. We have some ideas of how to avoid
that trap. And I think the experience of how we tell stories about
Leslie and her burgeoning family is going to be very different from
Ann and her burgeoning family. We don’t want to repeat ourselves, I
think repeating yourself is kind of, uh, death in television. People
have seen a lot of T.V. Everyone has seen a lot of T.V. So our biggest
goal, always is to be surprising.

Could this be a hint as to the big, surprising plot twist the cast has been teasing. Pratt recently said that the last few minutes of the finale “[leaves] us in a place that is going to be really, really insane to pick up from . . . and fun . . . Totally different. And new and exciting.” Twists are not usually Parks and Recreation’s style, and, unlike some sitcoms, I don’t expect this soft-hearted show to end with a bummer. But would a significant time jump solve all these problems? What if the last few minutes of the finale have us skip ahead to the babies already here? That opens the door to a million storytelling opportunities. So tune in tonight, and make sure you make it all the way to the end, No matter what’s in store for Knope, we’re confident she’ll knock it out of the park.